Nice Things Said Re: EWN

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1.

"Mr. Wickett is that rarely heard from but best of all possible reviewers - the dedicated and knowledgeable fan. He writes clean-cutting and fresh reviews that represent a sensibility unspoiled by over-exposure to the biz of books, but deeply in love with them."
Daniel Woodrell, author, Winter's Bone

3.

"Dan Wickett is a reader's best friend. Not only does he read and trenchantly review new work, but he looks back to books that deserve ongoing readership. I've lost track of the number of times he's led me to boks that I overlooked (or never knew about), and that were a delight. There aren't many reviewers I will let shape my library, but Dan Wickett is one."
Erin McGraw, author, The Baby Tree

May 31, 2011

There will indeed be a post of three today but I came NOWHERE near what I planned to do originally. There's only been ten days worth of posts for the daily posts of stories from a book and a journal and only one full book review and two collections I'm looking forward to posts. There's still some time today but I can guarantee I won't be cranking out the last 21 days worth of posts all in one day. Apologies to short story writers, readers, publishers, and lovers everywhere.

May 27, 2011

NOON is an annual literary journal that certainly has developed an aesthetic that poking through a couple of stories in any single issue will probably allow the potential reader to know whether or not s/he would like to subscribe and get each and every volume.

A writer that finds her work in this journal regularly (every issue since the third in 2002) is Kim Chinquee. Some years with multiple flash fictions and some years, such as this 2011 edition, with a single work, this time around the flash story, "Lorelei."

Seven short paragraphs, less than two full pages and yet Chinquee is able to pack in tons of information about her narrator.

Since my boyfriend Dave and I got there late and everyone else had ordered, I said I'd just have what he had. I sat next to his stepdad--his friends seemed fascinated with my life. I wasn't so fascinated. Dave didn't seem, at that point, so fascinated either.

More or less a straightforward introductory paragraph to get the reader into the setting.

I talked to one old man about my time in Mississippi. He'd been a history teacher, a basketball coach at one of hte universities where I graduated. Go Phoenix, he said. I knew Dave's ex had walked the halls there too, but only because he'd told me. Dave didn't really say much. I moved my attention to his stepdad, who talked about crabs on the beach. Floaties, how he missed them. Then about our Norwegian relatives. Ha-ha, I said, toasting. I said maybe we were already related.

With a simple move to a conversation, Chinquee has expounded our knowledge of the narrator and her boyfriend tenfold. While doing so, very subtly Chinquee is also telling the bigger picture story of the relationship between the narrator and her boyfriend, Dave. It might only be one small sentence or maybe two, but in each paragraph there is a little something, and in doing so, it allows Chinquee to really compress the work. If you're at all interested in reading or writing flash fiction, Kim Chinquee is definitely a practioner you want to track down.

Earlier this year, Garth Risk Hallberg wrote an essay about Joseph McElroy for the Los Angeles Times blog, Jacket Copy. He explained why McElroy's name should be listed with Barth, Coover, Pynchon, etc. on the list of Post-Modern greats, and also gave an explanation for why his monstrous novel, Women and Men, was well worth his effort in reading.

The name jumped out at me as one that I'd seen a book by in my mail recently and I was right--Dalkey Archive had recently published his short story collection, Night Souls and Other Stories and I had a copy. I opened it up to the 2nd story and found "The Man With the Bagful of Boomerangs in the Bois de Boulogne."

It opens:

He was not to be confused with my new friends or my old. He was there before I found him and he did not care about being discovered. I knew him by a thing he did. He threw boomerangs in the Bois de Boulogne. If he heard any of my questions, he kept them to himself. Perhaps we were there to be alone, I in Paris, he in the Bois that sometimes excludes the Paris it is part of.

In these sentences there is not a ton of information--no names, no real details about the narrator--yet in his own way, McElroy does move the story forward. His way includes these circular sentences that pick up on a bit from the previous sentence and then tack on the next bit.

I knew him by a thing he did. He threw boomerangs in the Bois de Boulogne.

These could easily have been combined. He simply could have said "I knew him from throwing ..." This somewhat circular way of propelling the story forward might become tiresome to some readers, which could explain why this collection wasn't heralded all over the literary landscape--this was his tenth work of fiction, and per his biography at his website he has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Ingram Merrill Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Among other universities he has taught at Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Temple, NYU, the University of Paris, and the City University of New York.

For the boomerang man from the Bois had told me what I could not have learned had I not already known it: that if it was worth telling, it was worth keeping secret, how he shied those pieces of himself down into the late autumn, his aim at some distance from him, his boomerangs quarrying not prey but chance which was to cast that old and various loop beyond routine success, dreaming the while of a point where at its outward limit the path's momentum paused upon a crest of stillness and by the logic of our lunatic hope did not return. In this way, although he will not hear me, he is still there when I go, and here when I come back.

I can't imagine many writers that would not love to say they wrote that paragraph.This is a writer whose resume says stand up and take notice when a new work is appearing and while it did receive a fair amount of attention, Night Souls and Other Stories should have had Freedom-like notice that it was coming. McElroy is definitely worthy of your attention, and dipping into his work via shorter work, such as the stories in this collection might just be the best means of doing so.

So, what excuse do I use for the fact that this will appear under a May 27 header but it's my May 9 post for stories from within collections? One thing that happened this Short Story Month is that I continued to find great sounding work while reading the blogs of others. For instance, Stephanie Vaughn was written up wonderfully over at Fiction Writers Review earlier this month. It led to me buying her book of stories, Sweet Talk (Random House, 1990). The last story in the collection is titled "Dog Heaven," which caught my attention. Turns out the story was originally published in The New Yorker and you can hear Tobias Wolff read it here.

Vaughn begins the story in a different way, by jumping forward 25 years and having the story come back to the narrator:

Every so often that dead dog dreams me up again.

It's twenty-five years later. I'm walking along 42nd Street in Manhattan the sounds of the city crashing beside me--horns, gearshifts, insults--somebody's chewing gum holding my foot to the pavement, when that dog wakes from his long sleep and imagines me.

I'm sweet again. I'm sweet-breathed and flat-limbed. Our family is stationed at Fort Niagara, and the dog swims his redheavy fur into the black Niagara River. Across the street from the officers' quarters, down the steep shady bank, the river, even this far downstream, has been clocked at nine miles per hour. The dog swims after the stick I have thrown.

It's an interesting maneuver and one that I think fits the story very well. The narrator is a seventh-grade aged girl, living, as the introduction notes, as the daughter of a soldier, and there are events in the story that I believe needed the weight of an adult-lived life for them to make sense, which would have left Vaughn with a conundrum had she written the whole story in present-time, trying to convince her reader that her 12 year old narrator was up to conveying the events and emotions that occur during the story.

It leads me to question whether or not she had the story begun, or written, in present tense and decided at some point to add the opening and write the rest in past tense, or if she started with that great opening line and then created a story to follow it? Either way, it's a great story and I'm glad for Forrest Anderson's post over at FWR that led me to find this collection.

You're in for a treat this morning readers, a post about short stories that was NOT written by me. Nope, it's a guest post from the wonderful David Abrams, he of The Quivering Pen blog (and the forthcoming novel, Fobbit, no time frame just yet). Here we go:

The best short-short stories are trash compactors. Short-shorts (aka flash fiction, micro-fiction, and postcard fiction) are repositories of all the scraps of life—the fruit peels, the hair clumps, the soup cans, the utility bills, the paper towels which soaked up that puddle of cat vomit you found with your bare feet on the kitchen floor at 2 a.m. Short-shorts squeeze and compress the whole beautiful trashy experience of life down to an unbelievably-small, impermeably-hard cube of matter which, if you could reconstitute it, would expand to the size of the average Dickens novel.

In her award-winning chapbook from Ropewalk Press, Cold June, Francine Witte delivers stories the size of a breadbox, but you always walk away feeling like you’ve eaten an entire bakery. The book is 26 pages long and there are 23 stories. That should give you some idea of length. What it doesn’t indicate is the depth and breadth of the stories. Witte is smart, sharp and very funny (I’d go so far as to say she’s a witty writer if it wasn’t such a lame play on her name).

As any short-story writer will tell you, there’s no time to be wasted—especially in short-shorts. Get in, get out, leave the reader reeling. Emotions are telegraphed, backstories are only hinted at, and language, the yeast of the writer’s bakery, must always rise to the occasion. In Witte’s case, it’s not just a question of what to leave out (though I imagine she revised these stories to within an inch of their lives) but what to put in. The details of her page-long scenarios are thrilling and memorable. Here, for instance, are three sentences from the collection’s title story:

The weatherman talks about a cooling sun, and predictions of ocean waves freezing mid-curl. Cuts to Florida where the local station shows icy palm trees with shivery fronds. Then, a citrus farmer, puffy cloud breath, screwdrivers open an orange, the fruit inside like broken glass.

Witte sets the stage with the standard signal words of cold weather: “freezing,” “icy,” “cloud breath.” But then she gives an unexpected twist to the language: the mid-curl waves, the shivering palm fronds, and that wonderful use of “screwdrivers” as a verb which leads to the equally juxtaposed image of the broken glass of the fruit. When I read sentences like those, something inside my own brain shatters and tinkles.

And that’s just the first story of the 23. Witte has plenty more surprises up her short sleeves. We learn that “Gluttony” is not just the title of a story, it’s also the main character’s favorite sin: “Sarah eats because frankly the food kisses her back.” On the next page, the story “Arm” begins: “Eunice felt worthless, and so she put her arm up for auction on e-Bay.” The story “Pretending” opens like this:

One day, Jenna pretends she is dead.

Pretending to be dead isn’t easy, as Jenna is quick to find out. You can’t go anywhere. You can’t even talk on the phone.

She breaks her phone rule to call Rolly. To tell him the news.

“Oh yeah?” he says. “You’ve been dead to me for awhile.”

You can see how Witte builds tension quickly, adhering to that get-in, get-out rule. There are only a few hundred words left in “Pretending,” but I’m already shifting in my seat at this point.

Like many short-short writers, Witte begins telling some of her stories in the titles with efficient economy, as in “When Mary Gets Shot in the Head,” which opens: “Her thoughts spill out on the street like fortune cookie tapes. I love you, Hector, I’m late for work, and shit, that guy has a gun!

In the space of 100 words, Witte can create entire worlds and put flesh on complex characters. What she shows the reader is the tip of the tip of the iceberg, hinting at the enormous mass floating beneath the waves. She is an incredibly intelligent writer who makes all the right choices; she knows just what to reveal and just what to keep submerged. For instance, our brief introduction to a man named Hank in “Arm” is all we need to know about his character: “Hank was balloony and humid and was always popping the buttons off his shirts.”

Most of the stories in Cold June center around relationships, particularly the struggles of male-female couples. In “The Miller’s Barbecue,” a love quadrangle comes to a head when a lovesick teenager jumps fully clothed into a swimming pool. In one story, Annabel and her boyfriend compete to see who can be first to air-dry after a shower; in another, Jim tells Mary to “get her naggy self off the planet,” so Mary rockets into the stratosphere to become a constellation (“Jim would need a telescope and a clear, moonless night, if he was ever going to see her again”).

Yes, metaphor is working overtime; and yes, oddity is at a premium on these pages. But Witte is never weird for weird’s sake. She always has something important to say and it’s wrapped in packages smaller than a breadbox. Cold June tackles big themes like global warming, class prejudice, adultery and domestic violence. There’s even a story called “Jetty Explains the Universe” which boils down to this: “it’s big and endless.” Not unlike Witte’s stories themselves.

David Abrams blogs about the literary life at The Quivering Pen (www.davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com). His stories have been published in Esquire, Narrative, Connecticut Review, and The Greensboro Review, among others. He is working on a comic novel about the Iraq War called Fobbit.

May 25, 2011

Coming this fall (September) from FSG is Frank Bill's collection, Crimes in Southern Indiana. I first heard of Frank's writing via Kyle Minor and then recently read this at the end of a PWreview of the collection:

"Readers who enjoy coal-black rural noir are in for a sadistic treat: flowing like awful mud and written in pulpy style, these stories paint a grisly portrait of the author's homeland. You might want to have your brass knuckles handy when reading."

It sounds like something I'm going to like. In fact it's a good bet that I will as I've dipped into some of the stories he's published online and have found similarites between his work and many authors I've promoted here in the past: Dayne Sherman, Pinckney Benedict, Daniel Woodrell, Larry Brown, Kyle Minor, and really many others. Not exactly like any of these writers, of course, but with similarities to things that I like a lot about their writing.

Dark stuff, moody, short and direct sentences. And I like that he's writing about Indiana, and what I'll assume will be rural Indiana at that. Leads me to believe there'll be some damn interesting characters in this collection. If I understand right, the stories all involve characters from a single town (not sure if it's a fictional town or not), which will probably invoke comparisons to Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff. That would be some nice praise if it happens.

This might even be postmen as it's been way too long since I've posted around here--there are about 20 started posts regarding short story month for one thing--I decided to combine all of the various Postman! material into one post.

Heather Fowler's Suspended Heart (Aqueous Books), which I ordered from the publisher as a) it seems like a cool publisher and b) I've enjoyed some of Heather's work in the past.

Aaron Polson's The Saints are Dead (Aqueous Books), which I also ordered from the publisher, mainly because when I went to order Heather's book, Aaron's was the new title on the front page and I thought the cover looked pretty cool. Yes, sometimes I do buy because of the cover.

Kelle Groom's memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (free press), which was sent to me courtesy of the publisher for possible review purposes (yes, I do disclose this when I receive materials complimentarily per the requirements from the FTC).

Sweet Talk by Stephanie Vaughn (Random House, 1990), which I bought used online after reading about it over at Fiction Writers Review. Forrest Anderson made it sound like a collection not to be missed.

There is Something Inside, it Wants to Get Out by Madeline McDonnell (Rescue Press), which was sent to me by the fine folks at Rescue Press when they read about Short Story Month. It's a small collection of a trio of stories from McDonnell that they published last year.

Glimmer Train Summer 2011 (Issue 79), a literary journal that I believe I have a complimentary subscription to (either that or long ago I paid for a lifetime subscription that I do not remember--more likely it's complimentary). Looking forward to reading work from three or four of the authors and any time Jeremiah Chamberlin interviews an author, I'm up for reading it.

Usby Michael Kimball (Tyrant Books) which I ordered as soon as I heard that it was available for pre-order. I really enjoyed Kimball's last novel, and had heard great things about this one from Matt Bell as well.

Guadalajara, stories by quim Monzo (Open Letter Press), which was sent to me by the publisher for potential review. I've dipped into this one already and am liking it. Per a blurb, Monzo is the best known writer in Catalan. This was translated by Peter Bush.

American Short Fiction, Spring 2011--this is a journal I know I have a complimentary subscription to and this issue has five new stories and I can guarantee one of them will be written about for Short Story Month here at the EWN.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ (the stars) by J.A. Tyler, one of five stand-alone sections of this work from one of our more interesting writers today. Four of the five sections were published May 15 and I've got two of theother three on order and the fourth was published online over at The Collagist. The section I received already is from Warm Milk Printing Press and was copy 29 of the limited edition of 100 copies.

Graywolf Press was kind enough to send me advanced reading copies of two Percival Everett novels. Their paperback reprint of Erasure (November 2011) and his latest novel, Assumption (November 2011), along with an erasure with Erasure by Percival Everett November 2011 printed on it. No covers showing anywhere online yet that I can find.

And Ecco was kind enough to send a poster reproduction of the Patrick deWitt cover that the artist that designed the cover made a limited edition run of, I assume due to the fact that they just sent me a review copy not so long ago. I was pretty excited to see it as I think the cover for The Sisters Brothers is simply fantastic. It's signed and numbered by the artist, number 17 of 150.

I also received a couple of copies (one has been mailed to Matthew Salesses per a FB promotion) of Rose Metal Press' latest great looking book, They Could No Longer Contain Themselves, a collection of flash fiction chapbooks from five authors (that's a full flash chapbook from each of the five authors: Elizabeth J. Colen, John Jodzio, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Sean Lovelace, and Mary Miller. I bought a copy and apparently am on the review list as well.

And lastly, a galley of 30 Under 30 (Starcherone Books) edited by Blake Butler and Lily Hoang. This one is at the printer now for final copies so get ready, the contributor list is pretty amazing.

May 14, 2011

While I can't be sure, as the month is only halfway through, and technically this is my Lit. Journal short story post for the 8th, I'm pretty sure that Michael Garriga's "Custody Battle for Chelsea Tammy: At the Toys "R" Us, Aisle 6, in a Suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, December 24, 1983" from the Spring 2011 issue of The Southern Review, is going to have the longest title of any story I read this month.

Garriga breaks this story into three parts, each told from the point of view of one of the main characters involved in the story's confrontation or action. Chelsea Tammy of the title turns out to be 1983's hot doll--the one every girl has to have. The first two points of view we get are the combatants, the two men doing what they have to in order to make their young daughters happy. The third is a stockboy at the Toys "R" Us who has a big hand in what is happening in an indirect, but extremely important way.

Garriga very nicely gets into each character's head and if the story were longer than one section told from each point of view, it would be very obvious upon entry of a new section which of this trio were thinking/speaking.

From "Lewis Malgrove, 38, Attorney and Divorced Father of a Six-Year-Old Daughter":

I am a trial attorney. I make a damn respectable living through confrontation. I own a Saab turbo sedan, a closet full of Polo and Armani, and a Movado watch my wife gave me for our anniversary the year before she left me. I bought a three-bedroom ranch in Buckhead, where my Jennifer attends the finest prep school, and my wife drives the Volvo 240 that I paid for and lost along with the house when she divorced me.

From "Sam Bowling (AKA "Pin"), 31, Vietnam Vet and Divorced Father of an Eight-Year-Old Daughter":

I yank him to me and grab hold of his neck right below his bobbin apple and squeeze and it feels good and I am back on R and r in the Thanh Hotel, downtown Saigon, '72, and Chi will be my girlfriend for the week and she feeds me shrimp dumplings dipped in fish sauce, savory and spicy, and I drink cold beer in a glass and she rubs lemongrass oil into my feet . . .

From "Witness: Chuck Simpson, 19, Stock Boy and Drug Dealer":

I came from dumping another stupid fat-face doll into the big Dumpster out back--that makes seventeen total, and at forty bucks apiece, that equals . . . shit if I know, like a thousand bones I guess, way more than I make at this job of peddling dime bags to my sister's pals, though Megan looks long at me when I give her the shotgun and our lips damn near brush--I've carried a crush on her for years and will make my move when she starts high school next fall--

Each is distinct from each other--the attorney's thoughts/speech clipped short, confident, everything contingent on material issues; the vet's thoughts/speech rather manicly paced, immediately referencing Nam; the stock boy's thoughts/speech about himself, at a lower level than the other two, the much shorter level of life experience showing clearly.

In choosing to only have one section per individual, Garriga was going to have to really map out there identities, give enough back story for the reader to become compelled to care about them, and do enough to move the story forward and not simply have it be a Rashomon tale. Good thing for the reader, he does just that. He's able to create this story about a potential tug-of-war over the last of the hot toys on the shelf and give it a unique spin not only in the way the tale is told, but also in the events within the story, events I will not spoil by sharing here.

May 12, 2011

One of the things I planned on writing about this month was collections I am looking forward to reading. This was to be a one per week idea and so, per usual, I'm behind one already, so look for a second one later this week (ie, today or tomorrow).

While there's no official release date on this one yet, it does look like the collection is going to be published in 2012--I'm just not at liberty to say by what pubisher yet. Steven Gillis' second collection, and sixth book, will be titled The Law of Strings and should contain 15 short stories, most, if not all, of which have seen face time in some great literary journals.

This would be that same Steven Gillis you just read about taking a Silver medal for his most recent novel in the IPPY Awards, and whose earlier short story collection, Giraffes (Atomic Quill Press), was a finalist for that award and others. Gillis' stories always amaze me with their ability to pack in a ton of information about science or philosophy or whatever it is his characters are interested in, or participating in, in a seamless fashion--it never feels like he's spent two or three pages explaining things, or making sure that the readers "get" what is going on. He does it in a manner that allows that information to flow through the characters and stories naturally.

Having all of these stories in one easy place to track them down is going to be fantastic.